Over the coming year Verizon previously announced plans to remove restrictions on the types of cell phones compatible with their wireless service. Moving this direction, allowing consumers to alter their phones’ operating system, is a natural extension of their new open wireless service business model.
Tired of all those negative ads? No, I’m not talking about the latest primary battle between Hillary and Obama.
A boy genius who can do other people’s tax returns struggles to decipher a bill from a phone company
Cable executives frustrated by the quantity of high-definition services offered by the satellite company; they end up turning the meeting into a “blame-storming” session.
Slowskys, a turtle couple overwhelmed by the speed of a cable modem who prefer the generally slower DSL services offered by phone companies.
The big ISPs appear to be in the midst of a marketing war. It’s a sign of vibrant competition between service providers… better service should follow.
Verizon’s FiOS launch (offering super high speed internet and TV service) in South Florida seems to be stumbling over basic customer service issues. A recent customer complaint is the Herald Tribune:
“I have continually been stalled, lied to, deceived and to date nobody at Verizon seems to have a clue what is going on,” Weisenbacher’s complaint reads. “It seems to me that Verizon is deliberately playing games with the general public assuming people will get so frustrated that they will simply drop the issue.” (read full)
Weisenbacher is one of 543 customers filing complaints with the Florida attorney general.
Verizon’s negligence is Comcast’s opportunity
Meanwhile, Comcast offers disgruntled customers a good alternative:
Competitor Comcast has begun offering to pay the termination fees for Verizon customers wanting to return to the Comcast.
“If you have become a Verizon customer and are unhappy, we have some win-back offers that will allow you to recoup your termination fee and come back to us,” said Mark Lipford, vice president and general manager for Comcast West Florida. “It’s interesting for every video customer we lose, we get 37 percent back within 30 days, either because they’re having technical problems, customer service problems or they can’t get SNN 6.”
I’ve heard about the idea of regular cell phones making calls via Wireless-Internet(WiFi) signals for many years, but this is the first mainstream product I’ve seen that actually does it. This thing is neat, check out the video!
Comcast’s new alliance with BitTorrent(a popular peer-to-peer file sharing software) shows private mediation is still the best solution for online conflicts. While impractical activists clamor for regulation, strictly enforcing neutral internet service, they fail to recognize some basic internet management is both desirable and necessary. ISPs Need Freedom to Overcome Challenges
Back in 2004 internet service providers(ISPs) had a glut of extra bandwidth (a measurement of internets capacity for traffic). However four years later (an eternity in the world of technology), this is no longer the case. During peak hours internet use now reaches full capacity (you may notice the internet seems a little slower in the early afternoon).
Should ISPs lose the right to manage service and protect their deeply invested internet infrastructure? In an online environment plagued by malicious spam, viruses, and spyware, do absolute net neutrality policies make sense? What good is a free internet if it doesn’t work? And should a free internet respect property rights, or conflicting utopian ideals?
Consider enacted net neutrality in Canada:
[A] Canadian court judge sentenced a London, Ontario man to nine months in prison for hate crimes. The defendant was brought to justice through the dogged efforts of Canadian civil rights lawyer Richard Warman. In response, operators of several hate websites targeted Warman, making explicit death threats against him.
Warman was justifiably was concerned that these threats could result in violence to him or his family. So he turned to Google in the U.S. and to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) (Canada’s FCC) and asked that the death threat web sites be blocked. Google, which was hosting one of the sites through its Blogger service, immediately complied, saying, “We want Blogger to enable free expression, including the hosting of views that are unpopular. However, advocating violence against a person is not acceptable.”
But in Canada – where there is the equivalent of net neutrality regulation – the bureaucratic red tape has resulted in inaction and the death threats remain online there(source).
Internet activities don’t deserve blanket protection, regardless of merit.
Meanwhile, a few weeks ago Comcast and BitTorrent announced a cooperative effort for enhanced service. The ISP and software designers are adjusting their operations to better complement each other. Tony Werner, chief technology officer of Comcast Cable, explained,
This means that we will have to rapidly reconfigure out network management technique that is more appropriate for today’s emerging Internet trends… We have been discussing this migration and its effects with leaders in the Internet community for the last several months, and we will refine, adjust and publish the technique based upon feedback and initial trial results(source).
You don’t have to understand the technical side to appreciate successful mediation between private parties. No regulations could produce such a constructive solution. An Internet run by the people, not the government, will always produce a better outcome for the consumer.
FCC Commissioner Robert M. McDowell commented,
The private sector is the best forum to resolve such disputes… It is precisely this kind of private sector solution that has been the bedrock of Internet governance since its inception. Government mandates cannot possibly contemplate the myriad of complexities and nuances of the Internet marketplace(source).
Considering the complex issues as a whole, the best way to preserve our treasured online resource, a free internet, is a continued U.S. commitment to non-regulatory polices.
These cell phone signal boosters, “femtocells,” designed for home use are one more reason to ditch your landline. The Associate Press explains:
Not only do femtocells improve coverage indoors, where the carrier has a hard time reaching, they reduce traffic on regular, outdoor cellular towers. Perhaps best of all, the carrier doesn’t have to pay to carry the traffic from the femtocell to its network, because the device plugs into a home broadband connection. The so-called “backhaul” traffic, which carries calls from a cellular tower to the wired network, is a major part of the cost of operating a wireless network.
While these gadgets threaten already suffering landline business of Verizon and AT&T, market forces may force them to embrace it anyway. Forrester Research analyst Charles Golvin comments, “‘They’re afraid that by deploying these femtocells, at least where they have a landline footprint, they might be putting their landline business at risk’… But that business is at risk anyway – a lack of femtocells may make cellular subscribers keep their landlines for another year or so, but not for long[.]”
Right now Sprint has a competitive lead, already offering them for $49.99 plus $15 a month for unlimited home calling.
Peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing online is the flash point of the present political conflict surrounding net neutrality. The ball started rolling when Comcast allegedly started discriminating against users of BitTorrent, a popular P2P file sharing software. Either way, the real issue is P2P software has a bad reputation for facilitating software piracy.
Clogging the internet with large illegal file transfers is disagreeable on several levels. This is where the Internet Service Provider (ISP) network management comes in.
But it’s important to stress that P2P software offers unique advantages of efficiency . Like any tool, it’s how you use it. There’s nothing inherently wrong with Bit Torrent, it just happens to be a popular tool for nefarious activities.
That’s why Verizon’s new development, P4P technology, is such good news. The Statesman explains:
“The advance is an enhancement of peer-to-peer file-sharing technology, which provides Internet users with faster downloads by gathering up pieces of a large file from the computers of many users and then cobbling them together… Sending files with the new technique along faster, cheaper paths resulted in download speeds that were an average of 60 percent faster…”
What differentiates P2P from P4P? PCMAG points out, “P4P actually works to push file’s packets from within the ISP’s network, avoiding paying for the extra bandwidth needed to reach an Internet backbone.” Theoretically, it would be a managed form of file sharing from the ISP end. It’s performance without the piracy
Verizon’s P4P holds great potential, the kind of potential a government regulated net neutrality environment threatens to destroy.
